As Candy hurries home, her steps echoing with the urgency of a tale yet unspoken, she engages in a ritualistic act of self-reconstruction, weaving a narrative of her whereabouts that she repeats verbatim to any listener willing to indulge her. Flashes of memory, like glimpses through a fractured mirror, hint at the encounter's intensity, but the fragments do not coalesce into a complete picture. Candy's eyes, damp with tears, dance on the brink of delirium; it is unclear if she genuinely believes herself capable of evading the consequences or if she merely clings to the illusion of a life unmarred. The interior of her home remains shrouded in mystery, save for the gruesome glimpse of blood-stained furnishings, leaving us to speculate on her efforts—or lack thereof—to conceal Betty's fate.
Her silence on the matter, both to Pat and Sherry, masks a deceitful calm. She guides Alisa to her swimming lesson and the cinema screening of The Empire Strikes Back, Elizabeth Olsen's face a vessel for all the drama, framed in close-ups that emphasize her damp eyes and the quiet tremor of her expression. She strives to maintain her composure, even when Allan calls, seeking word from Betty, whose absence from both phone and doorstep has aroused his concern. But her resolve is fraying.
Allan, with a growing sense of unease, recognizes that Betty, known for her reticent social life, could not have simply vanished into thin air. He gathers a few neighbors and issues specific instructions to gain entry into the house by any means necessary. The door yields without resistance. The bathroom reveals the ghastly aftermath of a violent encounter, while in an adjacent room, they find Betty's lifeless form and the baby's wails echo through the air as it cries alone in its crib. The discovery of these horrors underscores the gravity of the situation, painting a grim picture of events that transcend mere imagination into the realm of reality.
The neighbors whispered to Allan that Betty had seemingly been shot, and while they were no coroners, it seemed improbable that someone struck 41 times with an axe would succumb to a gunshot wound. Allan called Candy, who was engaged in a passionate tryst with Pat, to share the news, and she acted the part of a shocked and grief-stricken wife upon hearing it. The sex scene was peculiar, indeed. It was an intentional inclusion, but its meaning was indecipherable without suggesting Candy's outright psychopathy. Up until this point, she had been portrayed as genuinely befuddled by the whole affair, drifting through the day on autopilot, barely aware of her surroundings. But to return home and have sex with her husband while the daughter of the woman she had just murdered slept in the next room was bordering on the absurd.
Chief Abbott of the Wylie PD confirmed to Allan that Betty's death was indeed by gunshot. We didn't get a full view of her body until the sheriffs arrived to take photographs, but even then, it was clear that a gunshot wound was the least of her problems. A flyer for The Shining on the kitchen table led Abbott to suspect a cult-related murder. Did Candy leave that there, amidst an axe murder scene? Again, it didn't seem like the behavior of a woman acting purely in self-defense.
The sordid details soon spread like wildfire. The police ruled out premeditation – no one lugs an axe around in broad daylight, and there were signs of a struggle everywhere. But the footprints in the utility room were too small to be a man's. While no one suspected Candy of such heinous crimes, she knew that someone would eventually piece together the clues. She had been there that morning, and she had done it. That knowledge colored all her subsequent actions – including comforting Allan and Alisa when he told her the news – with a tinge of madness.
This was evident in Candy's deranged police interview and in her casualness about chopping up the flip-flops she was wearing with a pair of scissors. She was clearly trying to get away with the crime at this point, not the actions of a terrified, panicked woman but the calculated moves of someone truly cold-blooded.
Ultimately, it might be Allan who brings Candy down. She was already a person of interest to the police since she was the last person to see Betty alive, but the episode ended with Allan confessing to his own affair with Candy – a revelation that would surely cast a different light on the investigation.
